I'm a big believer in the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words". If you don't believe in that, then this blog will never be the right place for you. I think there is a fair amount of my blog readers who had actually visited me in my office, and they've seen how I have all sorts of diagrams covering the walls, starting from the infrastructure and solutions architectures, all the way to detailed blueprints for the deferent technologies that I implement in my environment. Beside the extreme fun I have designing these diagrams, just looking at them on daily basis help me identify the areas of improvement and future developments quite easily. Why am I telling you this small story? Well, you are going to see many of this stuff coming on my blog more than any time before folks!

Introducing the "VMware vSphere In The Enterprise" diagram v1.0

Disclaimer: This is a very, very high level "visualization" of the "virtualization" architecture using VMware vSphere. Having said that, this should never be taken for granted or looked at as the perfect design for your vSphere environment. There is no such thing as a "perfect design" at the first place. There is always a customer requirement, and best practices that we follow to achieve the "perfect solution" for the customer. I can't stress enough on this point as I know there are many VMware-newbie visitors on my blog who might be caught in this trap.

A word of appreciation: I'd like to thank Duncan Epping for his great work of choosing the (Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts), which even for me, as a good follower of that RSS feed, I always miss quite a few great posts in there. In week 29, Duncan selected this post that had an incredible list of network ports in the VMware environment, which I have used some of them in my diagram above. It's not the complete list of course since it's out of my diagram scope, although I do intend to do a complete "block diagram" in the future to visualize the entire list.

Printing Considerations:
In case you haven't noticed, this is an A2 scale diagram. I've initially tried to fit it into A3 while designing it but I couldn't. The amount of information and layouts were just too much to fit in the A3 scale. The diagram still prints well on A3, but you'll have a hard time reading some parts like the port numbers. That said, I highly recommend that you print it on an A2 plotter, which will give you the real look and feel of the diagram. In my case, although we have in our GIS department many plotters for printing even larger scales like A1 and A0, I just went to the nearest Xerox center and printed it there just to make sure how it will look like in commercial printing centers, and the printout was phenomenal.